Dirk's technicolour dream

DIRK Nannes is struggling to name all his previous Twenty20 teams. ''There's 14, definitely 14.'' He lists them out loud, like a child would the months of the year.

Australia, Holland, Victoria, three in England, two in India, one each in South Africa, Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, already two in the Big Bash League. It was Melbourne Renegades last season and now the Sydney Thunder.

The Hobart Hurricanes would be the perfect suit for season three. ''I still need purple, purple will compete the rainbow,'' he said.

''Purple was the colour of my school but it doesn't quite count.''

Fans can be excused for struggling to keep up with who's playing for who these days but that is the head-spinning nature of professional Twenty20.

No one highlights the fly-in, fly-out existence better than Nannes, whose Dutch heritage gave him a start in the orange, whose bounding pace earned him a belated Australian call-up, who now lives contract to contract and who estimates he has spent 60 nights at home in the past year (his wife puts it at 45).

He faces another old team on Friday night, when the Thunder hosts the Renegades at ANZ Stadium, but there will be no awkwardness, given he has done it all before.

Nannes became a first-class cricketer with Victoria at 29 and at 36 is now making up for lost time. Being a freelancer means organising his own fitness program, pushing his availability for tournaments - the Bangladesh Premier League is, hopefully, next stop - and flying in his family when stints extend beyond a month (by age five, his son had visited 20 countries).

He describes his career as a fickle one and admits to the odd worry it might end suddenly but concedes it is a charmed life being paid to travel the world playing cricket against the best. ''Ninety-nine per cent of people would bite their arm off to get this job,'' he said.

Nannes estimates there are only a handful of players with freelance careers similar to his: England's Owais Shah, New Zealand's Scott Styris and possibly the West Indies' Chris Gayle.

He does not expect many players to follow his well-travelled path because jobs are limited and as soon as players miss a tournament, their skills suffer.

For all the places cricket has taken him, there is one stop that eluded him: a Test match. Nannes said he would have been good enough but understood Australia would never have picked a debutant paceman aged 32 or 33.

So the Twenty20 roadshow has provided a strange normality.

''Because I've had so many things that I've done, it kind of feels quite normal to me, because I haven't had that grind of 12 years playing the same thing,'' he said. ''As for lifestyle, geez, it's a lot of chaos mixed with a lot of downtime. There's a whole lot of coffee drinking that goes on.''

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